Cerrado Forests and Savannas

Mostly located in Brazil, the Cerrado is the world's most biodiverse savanna, home to 5% of the planet's animals and plants, with a total area of about 2 million km². It is vital for providing clean water and sequestering carbon; 6 of Brazil's 12 main hydrological regions begin here, including the Pantanal, the largest wetland in the world.

This biome contains more than 10,000 plant species, over 1,200 bird species, and approximately 400 mammal species. Additionally, nine out of ten Brazilians use electricity generated by water that comes from the Cerrado (World Wild Life, 2019).

The loss of biodiversity in the Cerrado Forests and Savannas is due to land-use change driven by agribusiness expansion, poor urban and rural land-use planning, which leads to infrastructure being built without environmental safeguards, resulting in habitat loss and landscape fragmentation, conflicts of interest that limit the protection of areas with high ecological value, and a lack of infrastructure and regulation for treating greywater and industrial waste.